Tuesday, 9 April 2013

This article touches on a core problem for democracy. But add to this the fact that the corporate media and the corporate parties (Conservatives and Liberals in Canada) prey on this weakness of the populace in order to sway the people to vote against the people's own
interests. This makes anything that improves the democratic process,
like proportional representation (or even procedures that
take baby steps toward P.R.), critical to helping make democracy work
better for the people. Better education and less corporate control of
the media are also critical for democracy to flourish.

Some may try to argue, as if this is a different factor, that there are many people who just don't care enough about politics. This is not a different factor, but a result of the success of the propaganda of the corporate media/parties. Those people not smart enough to understand the importance of politics are convinced by the propaganda of the corporate media/parties to not care about politics. They will vehemently deny that they have been influenced, but they have (if they hadn't been influenced, they would care). These people end up not voting, and convincing others to either not vote or to spoil their votes in one way or another. This totally plays into what the corporate parties want - less involvement in politics by the populace = the more they can control politics. Politics in a vibrant democracy, is controlled by the people. In a failing democracy, politics is controlled by a few in government or in political parties whose true agenda is mainly to hold onto power by reducing the input from and control by the people.

What is MMP?

MMP stands for Mixed Member Proportional.

It is a new electoral system proposed for Ontario. If you are voting in the upcoming Ontario Provincial Election on Oct 10, 2007, There will be a referendum question asking if you want to keep the current system or change to use MMP.

With the proposed MMP in Ontario, you will vote for a local candidate and a party - it's that simple.

Then, when the votes are all tallied, if a party has proportionally less seats than the percentage of the overall vote they received, they get additional general party seats known as List seats. So, in the end, the number of seats a party has in parliament, is directly proportional to the percentage of votes they received.

Example: If party A received 40% of the vote, then they get 40% of the seats.